If you're customizing a system and intend to run Linux on it at you certainly want to pick cards that are supported. The "packaged Linux" vendors, like RedHat, Caldera, etc all have Hardware Compatibiliy Lists (HCL) that list all of the hardware that's known to work in their version of Linux. I know that RedHat's & Caldera's are viewable online (www.redhat.com, www.caldera.com) and probably others are also.

You'll typically find that the supported hardware isn't going to be the latest & greatest. It takes time to develop drivers and the Linux community generally has to wait for the card to be released to even begin to start work. In the windows world the vendor gets to create the driver while they are getting the card in production.

Stick with stuff that's known to work, at least in the beginning. Some of the newer stuff that's not on the HCL can be made to work with patched drivers, updated modules, later version of X than is distributed with the OS, etc. It can be a fair bit of work and frustration to try to get unsupported cards to work.

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julitoAuthor Commented: 2000-02-08

Hi jlevie

Your question seems to be OK, however I reject it in order to see more answer.

The Anthalon became generally available very late in the production of 6.1, as I recall. So there probably wasn't time for through regression testing. I doubt that the Anthalon processor would be a problem and I'm pretty sure that I'm seen some folks using it on.

BTW is an Internet acronym for "By The Way".

Of all the devices on your list the modem is probably the least concern, if it's an external modem that has an "AT" command set. And generally, in a Linux environment you're always better off to use an external modem in terms of compatability. I alway recommend external modems, even for windows platforms. An external modem can take a lightning strike on the phone line and you'll usually just loose the modem. When it's internal with direct connections to all the hardware its quite common to have most everything inside the box get fried.

Most of the times, the devices you want for your dream Linux machine are not supported by a single Linux vendor. But you can still make those devices work by using drivers from different vendors. I got drivers from SuSe and Mandrake work on my RedHat 6.0. Experiment...

Just edit /etc/rc.d/rc.modules with "VI" and uncomment the lines for the devices you want to have support. These are called "kernel modules", they're not compiled in the kernel to avoid getting it bloated with stuff you won't use. So they're loaded only if you want, from that file.

By the way, the word "drivers" in Linux is deprecated. In Linux, software that add support for devices or features are called "kernel modules" or just "modules".

No problem, pal. Count on me whenever you wanna share some thoughts... By the way, a very interesting website to get Linux info is http://www.slackware.com/forum/ There's the cool advantage that you won't need "points" there to make questions.